First, thanks to all the students whose hard work produced the data in the Bestsellers Database
This project has been supported (in 1999) by a grant from the University of Virginia's Teaching + Technology Initiative. Under the auspices of that grant, evaluation, programming, and database design has been contributed by Tom Kane and Charles Sligh (English Department, GS), Mike Thompson and JJ Tavernier (Computer Science, UG), John Ashenfelter and Yitna Firdiweck (TTI Program). Additional consultation on evaluative techniques was generously provided by Walter F. Heinecke, Curry School of Education, Educational Evaluation Program.
Special thanks to the staff of the University Libraries' Electronic Text Center, Digital Image Center, Reference Department, Special Collections, and Video Department for their generous assistance to the instructor and students in this course during the years it was taught at the University of Virginia. Thanks also to Jo Kibbee and staff at the Library of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for similar assistance more recently.
Course materials have been contributed by Terry Belanger (University of Virginia, Book Arts Press) and by Marija Dalbello (Catholic University of America, School of Library and Information Science) and her students (Mike Bernier, Melissa Brall, Elizabeth Gettins-Avins, Donna Jacumin, Robert Kehoe, Stacie Larson, Katherine Margolis, Patricia O'Callaghan-Tamayo, Lisa Payne, Laura Sekela, and David Sukites).
This course uses HTML pages and forms designed and written by John Unsworth, a Mysql database set up by Oludotun Akinola (from the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities), and perl5 scripts written by Oludotun Akinola and John Unsworth. Additional technical support was provided by Pete Yadlowsky and Mark Manley. The course materials and Mysql database were housed at Virginia on ITC servers, and thanks are due to Hamp Carruth, and the ITC Unix Systems Group that he heads, for administering the systems on which this course depended during those years. More recently, the database is housed on servers at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and thanks go to Brynnen Owen and Amit Kumar for assistance with technical matters at UIUC.
The Bestsellers Database is cumulative, but the syllabus changes from semester to semester. Syllabi are available for:
A version of this course has also been taught at Catholic University, by Maria Dalbello, as part of a graduate curriculum in Library Science: